Sir Gerald Kaufman, UK Labor MP, January 16, 2009
Author Archives: Lila
Blogging Projects..
Apologies for not having blogged for a while on Madoff and the “kleptocrat” angle of the financial story.
The reason is the web harassment I’ve talked about before. I’m not intimidated by it, but I think it’s a good idea for me to get my cyberhouse in order before I embark on more research on that. It looks like parts of that story might intersect with another story that’s been troubling me, which I can’t get into here.
When highly credentialed journalists start telling you to buy a revolver, you begin to wonder if you shouldn’t stop being bo-peep and try mata hari for real.
I also have some restructuring of my life going on that takes up most of my time and energy – so my posts have become a bit erratic.
My dream of becoming a professional wanderer, a vagabond of the net, is within a year (or so) of realization. Once I complete the structures I need to set up, this blog will become professional.
It will turn into a magazine and an online community, which is my dream.
Government Posts Highly Confidential Civilian Nuke Info on Internet
Oh dear. The blunderbuss in Washington strikes again. AP reports:
“WASHINGTON – The government accidentally posted on the Internet a list of government and civilian nuclear facilities and their activities in the United States, but U.S. officials said Wednesday the posting included no information that compromised national security.
However, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, questioned about the disclosure at a House hearing, expressed concern with respect to a uranium storage facility at the department’s Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The facility holds large quantities of highly enriched uranium, which if obtained can be used to fashion a nuclear weapon.
“That’s of great concern,” said Chu, referring to the Y-12 site. “We will be looking hard and making sure physical security of those sites (at Y-12) is sufficient to prevent eco-terrorists and others getting hold of that material.”
But later Chu told reporters that while the disclosure may be embarrassing “there’s no secret classified information that’s been compromised (and) the sites and everything are public knowledge” already available elsewhere.”
My Comment
The rest of the article, which refers to the material as “sensitive” and “highly confidential” and unavailable in one place anywhere else, seems to contradict the phlegmatic Mr. Chu.
But this is bureaucracy in action. Listen up, people. This is the lot that’s scaring you into thinking your safety is their number one priority. Right. That’s why Congress has its underground bunker all fitted out and ready to go in case of some endgame fireworks.
And you have…what? A house. Oh yes. That paper-mache prefab box on which you’re upside down anyway…
That should be a real haven in case of a thermo-nuclear accident in the vicinity.
And I suppose you also have a great permanent job with fantastic medical coverage for you and all your little tots too, in case…just supposing, I mean…that said nuclear incident might have a teeny-weeny negative effect on your health.
Eduardo Galeano on the International Community
Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, on the International Community:
“The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. The civilian victims are called collateral damages, according to the dictionary of the other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten collateral damages are children. And the maimed add up to thousands, victims of human mutilation that the war industry is successfully rehearsing in this operation of ethnic cleansing. And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.
Dangerous people –warning of another bombardment – in charge of the enormous manipulative media that invite us to think that each Israeli life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives. And those media also invite us to think that the two hundred atom bombs of Israel are humanitarian, and that a nuclear power called Iran was the one that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The so-called international community, Does it exist? Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers and war-makers?……..
Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands off. As always. And, as ever, the European countries wring their hands. Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, sheds a tear or so, while secretly celebrating this master move. Because hunting the Jews was always a European custom, but since half a century that historical debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who also are Semites and who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood money, the price of others.
(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by the Latin American dictatorships to which Israel acted as consultant).”
Neither Right Nor Left Nor Stupid
Increasingly, I find that I fit neither left nor right, as it’s conceived in the United States. I’m not even a libertarian.
I’m not surprised.
People have a relationship to language that I find puzzling and foreign to me. Even repugnant. It’s an instrumental view. It’s also a very fundamentalist and dogmatic view.
Words are much more complex than that. To fit our narrow ideologies into them, we have to drain them of their power, their ambiguity, their richness – all the ways in which they don’t mean what we say. They never do. And bless them for that. Bless them that they always escape us. As experience always escapes us.
I am not a progressive, if progress means latching on to every idiotic scheme that flatters its manufacturer’s vanity at the expense of hard-won experience.
I am not a conservative, if conservatism means mistaking your own prejudices and ignorance for immutable truths.
I am not a libertarian, if liberty is a theory that you force on the reality of freedom and unfreedom.
I am not a pragmatist, if pragmatism is simply opportunism disguising itself as prudence and state craft.
I am not an extremist, if extremism is driving a good idea into insanity by literalism.
I am not a moderate, if moderation means selling your conscience to mass opinion.
Large parts of public debate are simply stupid, in the broadest sense of that term.
First, they are stupid, because many of the people engaging in them aren’t smart. Sorry. It’s just so – they aren’t people who’ve subjected themselves to any discipline besides saying whatever they think at the moment, unrestricted by expertise, criticism, reality, history, memory, conscience, or anything else.
Journalists simply aren’t true professionals in many respects and don’t have standards equivalent to the legal or medical profession. The IQ necessary to practice journalism of any kind isn’t that high. Writers generally tend to be smart people, because it takes a high level of intelligence to sustain an argument through the length of a book or through a good academic paper. But most journalists write little reports of 5-8 paragraphs – most of it on the order of “he said,” “she said,” and “then so and so did” – and sometimes they don’t even get around to doing that.
Second – public debates have become stupid, because there’s too much chatter going on. And the quality of things tends to deteriorate when the quantity goes up. Good ideas get taken up by dumb people and at the end of it, the good idea isn’t recognizable any more as good…or even as an idea. It turns into a slogan, an idiocy, and it tends to produce idiocy even in intelligent people who take it up.
Third – public debate is stupid because ideology tends to make us stupid. It requires us to strait-jacket our thinking, to look through a particular lens, to read only our side sympathetically, to pick winners and losers competitively.
Words have their own destiny. They are not our pawns or hostages.
Royal Canadian Mint Missing Gold, Silver, & PM Holdings
In the news, a Canwest News report notes that the Royal Canadian Mint has been caught with its gold, silver and other precious metals AWOL…
“A significant quantity of gold, silver and other precious metals is unaccounted for at the Royal Canadian Mint.
External auditors are investigating a discrepancy between the mint’s 2008 financial accounting of its precious metals holdings and the physical stockpile at the plant on Sussex Drive in Ottawa.
The mystery raises possibilities from sloppy bookkeeping to a gold heist.
Officials with the commercial Crown corporation are saying little and refuse to confirm the amount and value of the unaccounted for gold, silver and palladium.”
Team Obama Turns Up Heat on NY Journalist
Michelle Malkin, writing in The Pittsburgh Tribune Online:
“As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.
In an e-mail message to whistle-blower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:
“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else. I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”
It’s only just begun.”
My Comment
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider Michelle Malkin anything but a very partisan source. I find her incredibly abrasive and limited. But this story really needs attention, not so much for the revelations about ACORN and the Obama campaign (what else would you expect?), but for the insight into how the government handles the “free” press when it gets out of line.
Short the American Public
Suze Orman on the FDIC versus a shoe-box:
Here’s what Karl Denninger at Market Ticker had to say about her performance:
“If you believe that having 0.27% of the insured base of deposits as a reserve, having lost more than two thirds of the original reserve due to malfeasance and misfeasance, when not one person has been indicted, prosecuted or imprisoned for their misconduct over the previous two years constitutes “well-capitalized, prudently operated and able to meet insurance obligations”…
… you are free to believe that.
I will however strongly suggest that you investigate the facts for yourself before believing Suze Orman playing “mouthpiece” for a clearly-desperate regulatory apparatus that has allowed the wholesale looting of the American Taxpayer to occur – a regulatory apparatus and government, from the top down that will, it appears, continue to rob you blind until and unless you, the people, demand that it stop.
Disclosure: Short the American people, who appear to be as dumb as a box of rocks for putting up with this crap.”
My Comment
The Suze Orman video isn’t alone. The past few weeks have seen an uptick in Polyanna-ish messages about the economy, some of them making distinct swipes at libertarian doom-sayers.
Here’s some positive spin early in May from The Times Online (UK):
“The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said yesterday there were indications that the country was experiencing a “pause in the economic slowdown”.
The multibillionaire investor George Soros echoed the positive forecast, saying that a meltdown of the world’s financial system had been averted. Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank, said that some countries had already moved beyond the worst of their recessions.”
That simply echoed what US policy makers were saying early in April:
“Top US officials on Saturday offered reassurances that the worst of the economic downturn is likely over, helped by unprecedented efforts to keep credit flowing, though the recovery will be slow. Two Federal Reserve policy-makers, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and New York Fed chief William Dudley, both pointed to signs that measures taken by the US central bank are indeed working to help revive the economy”
Note that Kohn was the one who stone-walled Congress when pressed for the names of AIG’s counterparties. What are the chances he’s a disinterested observer? Nil, I’d say…
Paul Lawrence Dunbar on Conscience
“Good bye, I said to my conscience,
Goodbye, for aye and aye,
And I put her hands off harshly,
And turned my face away;
And conscience smitten sorely,
Returned not from that day.”
— Conscience and Remorse, Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Anne Williamson on the IMF’s Role in the Mexican Crisis
An expert on the neo-liberal rape of Russia, as well as on international finance in general, Anne Williamson testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, on Sept. 21, 1999. The testimony is well worth reading through today. It shows how precisely the situation in the 1990s during the various financial crises parallels the crisis today in the US. Even the actors are the same – from Harvard to the IMF to Goldman Sachs.
This is why I’ve consistently argued against any policy prescribed by this government. Anything suggested by such a corrupt group of actors should be suspect. There’s no point criticizing a Summers or a Geithner or a Paulson alone, when those who oppose them also accept the underlying premises of their arguments; they merely split the difference over a solution that is in essence no different. That is, their “differences” are essentially cosmetic.
I had the privilege of talking at length to Anne and found that her own experiences with the media and publishers were much like mine, only worse. The reasons for that are obvious. Ask for reform of the IMF or of the World Bank or of the Fed and you will get a sympathetic ear. Ask for the abolition of these institutions and you have questioned the entire system and the credibility of the functionaries and apparatchiks who run it. That’s unforgivable.
“Some governments — especially those with an election on the horizon — actually want to devalue since national exporters, their goods now being cheaper, sell more goods. Global lenders like the IMF are also fond of devaluations because a rising national income from bargain exports leave plenty in the national kitty for principal and interest payments to them. (Global direct investors — the “good guys” — fear devaluations, because their profits calculated in a devalued domestic currency buy fewer dollars for repatriation.)
But when exchange rates depreciate rapidly the specter of capital flowing out of a country appears. Foreigners and residents put their savings elsewhere. The currency goes into free fall, its value plummets, more investors flee and at the end of the cycle, interest rates skyrocket. This is exactly what happened in Asia in 1997, in Russia in 1998 and will soon happen in both Brazil and China.
Yet to curse the speculators is useless; since the 1972 collapse of Bretton Woods that broke the international link between the dollar and gold, the fear of the syndrome described above is the only remaining bit of discipline in the international system. How much better, the globalists reason, if there were to be one central bank and one fiat currency for everyone so that then national leaderships (and the financial oligarchies they sustain) could inflate and rob their own populations in unison, thereby perpetually enserfing all the world’s people….”
And on the role of the IMF:
“In mid-July 1994 — at the very moment dollar-based Mexican tesobonos were being oversold to prosperous clients of Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investment banks, which, in turn, would lead to the 1995 Mexican bailout and the introduction of moral hazard into the world’s financial system — Michel Camdessus told a press conference that he intended to press for the creation of a new IMF facility to give members resources with which to defend themselves against speculative attacks in financial markets.
In other words, long before bailouts of entire countries became routine Camdessus wanted a new loan program to feed the last disciplinarians in the world’s financial system — currency speculators — so that national governments might become even more unaccountable to their citizens. At the time, The Economist slammed the proposal, saying it was “absurd and almost certainly unworkable,” since Camdessus “bizarrely” was assuming the IMF would know more about economic fundamentals than the markets. And that assumption, The Economist noted, was the very assumption which had been the undoing of the USSR’s centrally planned empire. But Camdessus’ 1994 plan is the very one the U.S. President proposed just this week!”
Read the rest of her testimony here.